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Posts Tagged ‘Malware’

Phishing Attacks – How Your Old Passwords Can Come Back To Bite You

As a security professional, I spend a considerable amount of time building awareness around good password hygiene, and I am starting to see forward progress in efforts like moving users away from short passwords to longer passphrases.  But even as we are moving towards better password selection, most people don’t know that their old passwords […]

Wanna[Cry|Scream|Belch] Ransomware

I breathed a sigh of relief last Friday when I learned that Microsoft had patched a vulnerability in March that was recently exploited by the WannaCrypt0r ransomware.  I opt to have Windows OS updates installed automatically on my workstation so I was protected before the ransomware poked through the crust from the bowels of its […]

Mulling Ransomware – Eye-Opening Cybersecurity Statistics

Cisco recently released their Annual Cybersecurity report for 2017, which revealed several statistics I thought were real eye openers. You can pick up a copy here: http://b2me.cisco.com/en-us-annual-cybersecurity-report-2017. Of the major findings in this document, I consider a few quite concerning, in particular: “Spam accounts for nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of total email volume… about 8 percent […]

Fighting Cybercrime, From JPMorgan To Bank Of America

A new quarterly Cybersecurity Market Report was published by Cybersecurity Ventures, projecting $1 trillion will be spent on cybersecurity between 2017 and 2021. According to Steve Morgan, founder and editor-in-chief of Cybersecurity Ventures, the increase in cybercrime, such as ransomware and malware, and the large number of digital devices being rapidly deployed by organizations and […]

Ransomware Attacks – Paying the Ransom Isn’t Always Successful

As I have commented on earlier, ransomware attacks are focusing on institutions and are causing high impact outages. As this Announcement from the University indicates, they have paid a ransom and are in the process of getting their systems back. As the Kansas Heart Hospital found out, sometimes paying the ransom get your systems back. The hospital had to […]

4 Security Takeaways From The FBI

As IT consultants, we’re pretty sure that we’re smart enough to recognize phishing attacks against us. We all get emails asking us to open invoices, confirm our bank account information, or perform other actions designed to separate us from our credentials and our money. But according to a consultant specializing in penetration testing, 40% of us will still […]

My Top 7 Google Security Tips for Users and Admins

I.  Create Safe and Secure Passwords – By far the easiest way to access your mail account for nefarious activity is by using a stolen password. Google Apps User Make sure you create safe and unique passwords for all your important accounts Make sure you store your passwords in a secure way Try using a password generator […]